The 2013-14 season is a landmark for the San Diego Symphony, with the orchestra’s debut in New York’s Carnegie Hall and a weeklong tour of China that is its first venture outside North America.

Those concerts are of considerable significance, especially to music director Jahja Ling. The only conductor of Chinese descent leading a major American orchestra, he has frequently conducted in China and is excited about showing off “his orchestra” there.

Also important to Ling, who marks his 10th anniversary as music director with the 2013-14 season, is a concert he won’t be conducting.

One of Ling’s mentors, the veteran maestro Christoph von Dohnányi, will guest conduct the San Diego Symphony for the first time April 25 and 26, 2014. While music director of The Cleveland Orchestra, the revered maestro appointed Ling resident conductor and the two men had a close, productive working relationship for 18 years.

“I was his most trusted, right-hand man,” said Ling in a recent interview in the orchestra’s offices in Copley Symphony Hall. “That’s why he’s coming. He’s 85 years old and he turned down Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s hard for him to travel and he said he doesn’t conduct on the West Coast. But he wants to come here after he heard what we are building.”

Fostering flexibility

One of the reasons Ling, now 61, prevailed a decade ago — when he was hired as the orchestra’s music director after an intensive, international search — was his commitment to building an orchestra. In collaboration with the orchestra’s principal players and audition committee members, Ling has personally hired nearly two-thirds of its current musicians, making it one of the youngest orchestras in the country. And by conducting most of the orchestra’s Masterworks concerts (10 out of 13), he is certain to have a strong impact on those players.

But he professes little interest in developing a “San Diego sound,” akin to the celebrated Cleveland sound or the Philadelphia sound.

“I think that’s overrated,” Ling said. Instead, he’s looking for flexibility and creating an ensemble that can adapt itself to any repertoire.

“I feel an orchestra, a great orchestra, should be able to play according to what the composer asks you to play,” Ling said. “Maybe if you are playing classical (Mozart and Haydn, for example), then you should be playing like the Cleveland Orchestra, with that transparent sound.” But for Brahms and Beethoven, “perhaps the sound of the Vienna or Berlin” might be more appropriate.

Ling cites four primary influences on his musical approach: Otto-Werner Mueller (his teacher at Yale), Kurt Mazur (who mentored him in San Francisco), Dohnányi (his music director at Cleveland), and especially Leonard Bernstein (while Ling was a conducting fellow at Tanglewood and in Los Angeles).

“Lenny brought a completely different kind of approach than those Central European conductors,” Ling said. While his other mentors represented an aspect of the classical tradition, Bernstein was an iconoclast, a highly individual, charismatic figure whose gestures on the podium were often incomprehensible in purely technical terms.